Even when African-American students complete the recommended “core or more” college readiness courses in high school, they still don’t meet the “college readiness” benchmarks on the ACT at the same rate as other students, according to a new report released jointly Monday by ACT and UNCF.

Officials at ACT say the statistics—based on national ACT data and a new report titled “The Condition of College & Career Readiness 2014: African American Students”—suggest that African-American students are being subjected to less rigorous instruction than that of their peers who perform better on the ACT.

“We know the impact it can have,” said Steve Kappler, a vice president at ACT, speaking in reference to the impact of rigorous classes and high-quality instruction, or lack thereof.

If students are taking the right courses yet achieving different results, Kappler said, “It’s not necessarily about the students per se. It’s about a system.”

The report released Monday shows that ACT-tested African-American high school students who took the “core curriculum” courses—that is, four years of English, three years of math, science and social studies—routinely met the ACT college readiness benchmarks at a higher rate than African-American high school students who took less than the core curriculum.

More specifically, those who took the “core or more” met the ACT college readiness benchmark at a rate of 36 percent in English, 19 percent in reading, 15 percent in math and 11 percent in science, whereas those who took “less than core” met the benchmarks in those subjects at a rate of 15, 11, 2 and 4 percent, respectively.

However, even though African-American students who took the “core or more” did better than African-American students who did not, when compared to other students nationally who took the core or more, the situation is different.

More specifically, nationally, 67 percent of students who took the core or more met the ACT College Readiness Benchmark in English, 47 met it in reading, 46 in math and 41 in science—essentially anywhere from double to triple the rate of African-American students who took the core or more.

“The findings of this report demonstrate that a vast majority of African-American students desire a postsecondary education, but they’re clearly not prepared for it,” said Michael L. Lomax, president and CEO of UNCF. “We must work together to bridge that gap from aspiration to reality by providing quality education and policies focused on college readiness.”

ACT maintains that students who meet its benchmarks are more likely to succeed in college.

But not everyone was convinced that the ACT findings prove much except disparities in other realms of life that transcend the world of education.

Longtime test critic Robert A. Schaeffer, Public Education Director of FairTest, the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, said many institutions of higher education have found that “benchmarks” are “not particularly helpful, particularly for applicants from historically disenfranchised populations.”

“That is one reason why more and more schools, such as George Washington University, are dropping ACT/SAT standardized exam requirements, instituting test-optional admissions, and relying more heavily on high school course performance,” Schaeffer said, noting an announcement by GWU Monday that it would no longer require most of its incoming freshman applicants to submit college entrance exam scores.

Another wrinkle is that not much is known about the nature of the grades being achieved by students who take the core or more. Even if it were known, grading policies and rigor vary from school to school to the point where it could make comparisons difficult or meaningless.

But for Schaeffer, it wouldn’t matter anyway.

“College admissions tests, such as the ACT, are not designed to measure the same thing as grades in individual high school courses,” he said. “What the standardized exams do best is capture ‘accumulated opportunity,’ a host of factors that go back as far as prenatal experiences.

“As we well know, most African-American and other historically disenfranchised students have not had anywhere the same level of educational, economic, and social opportunities as their peers from majority populations, particularly well-to-do families,” Schaeffer continued. “Thus, it is not surprising that scores remain lower even with identical high course work and instruction.”

Students take take a test at New Orleans school. Showing their commitment to education, black families stood in line for hours to enroll their children in choice schools this month. (The Washington Post Photo by Edmund D. Fountain for The Washington Post)

Improving black students’ learning doesn’t “start at home.”

By Andre M. Perry

July 30, 2014

Dr. Andre Perry is the founding dean of urban education at Davenport University in Grand Rapids, Mich. He is the author of The Garden Path: The Miseducation of a City.

Students take take a test at New Orleans school. Showing their commitment to education, black families stood in line for hours to enroll their children in choice schools this month. (Photo by Edmund D. Fountain for The Washington Post)

Mayors, teachers unions, and news commentators have boiled down the academic achievement gap between white and black students to one root cause: parents. Even black leaders and barbershop chatter target “lazy parents” for academic failure in their communities, dismissing the complex web of obstacles that assault urban students daily. In 2011, then-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg exemplified this thinking by saying, “Unfortunately, there are some parents who…never had a formal education and they don’t understand the value of an education.” Earlier this year, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Tony Norman diagnosed that city’s public schools’ chief problem: the lack of “active, radical involvement of every parent.” And even President Obama rued last week that in some black communities, gaining education is viewed as “acting white.”

Clearly, there is widespread belief that black parents don’t value education. The default opinion has become “it’s the parents” — not the governance, the curriculum, the instruction, the policy, nor the lack of resources — that create problems in urban schools. That’s wrong. Everyday actions continuously contradict the idea that low-income black families don’t care about their children’s schooling, with parents battling against limited resources to access better educations than their circumstances would otherwise afford their children.

In New Orleans this month, hundreds of families waited in the heat for hours in hopes of getting their children into their favorite schools. New Orleans’ unique decentralized education system is comprised largely of charter schools and assigns students through a computerized matching system. Parents unhappy with their child’s assignment must request a different school in person at an enrollment center, with requests granted on a first-come, first-served basis. This year, changes were made to the timing and location for parents to request changes. A long line began forming at the center at 6 a.m. By 9:45 a.m., it stretched around the block. By 12:45 p.m., officials stopped giving out numbers because they didn’t have enough staff to meet with every parent.

Research backs up the anecdotal evidence. Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research recently found that African Americans are most likely to value a post-secondary education in becoming successful, at 90 percent, followed by Asians and Latinos. Whites, at 64 percent, were least likely to believe higher education is necessary for success.

When judging black families’ commitment to education, many are confusing will with way. These parents have the will to provide quality schooling for their children, but often, they lack the way: the social capital, the money and the access to elite institutions. There is a difference between valuing an education and having the resources to tap that value.

A study released this month found 26 percent of ACT-tested students were college-ready in all four subject areas. Among low-income students, college-readiness dropped to just 11 percent. The study determined that it was poverty, not motivation or attitudes, that contributed to the lower performance. “Nearly all ACT-tested students from low-income families in the United States aspire to go to college — at an even higher rate than students overall — but many lack the academic preparation to reach this goal,” the ACT noted.

Privileged parents hold onto the false notion that their children’s progress comes from thrift, dedication and hard work — not from the money their parents made. Our assumption that “poverty doesn’t matter” and insistence on blaming black families’ perceived disinterest in education for their children’s underachievement simply reflects our negative attitudes towards poor, brown people and deflects our responsibility to address the real root problems of the achievement gap. Our negative attitudes about poor people keep us from providing the best services and schools to low-income families.

This thinking hurts not only children, but entire communities. Low expectations extend beyond the classroom into homes and neighborhoods. The greatest tragedy of the New Orleans school enrollment fiasco isn’t just that parents had to wait in long lines. It’s that the school district assumed parents wouldn’t show up. Officials assumed grandma wouldn’t be there before dawn. They assumed Ma wouldn’t take off work with child in tow. This is a sign of deficit thinking — the practice of making decisions based on negative assumptions about particular socioeconomic, racial and ethnic groups. The enrollment center was understaffed because officials assumed applying for school wouldn’t demand a larger venue, like the Mercedes Benz Superdome. An aside: The Superdome hosts the Urban League of Greater New Orleans’ annual Schools Expo.

When it comes to providing a better education for black children from low-income families, I worry less about poor folks’ abilities to wait in long lines and more about the school policies, the city halls, the newspaper columns and the barbershops that are plagued with deficit thinking.

Calls on him to establish the ‘John Hope Franklin Commission on Reparatory Justice’

Kamm Howard

In the wake of the recent massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, the National African-American Reparations Commission (NAARC) is calling on President Obama to issue an executive order that establishes a Commission on Reparatory Justice to address white supremacy “in all of its individual, institutional and structural manifestations.”

The letter describes white supremacy and racism as “a deadly disease” that remains deeply imbedded in the American psyche and the social, economic and political fabric of US society.

“As you prepare to deliver the eulogy at the home-going service of Rev. Clementa Pickney on the occasion of the unspeakable tragedy of his murder and that of eight other members of the historic Emmanuel AME Church

The National African-American Reparations Commission (NAARC) is comprised of eminent black leaders from the legal, academic, health and faith-based communities across the country.

NAARC is requesting that President Obama name the Commission in honor of the esteemed historian and academic Dr. John Hope Franklin who had chaired President Bill Clinton’s Commission on Race some 22 years ago. “In honor of Dr. Franklin’s 100th birthday, we call upon you to have the vision to create a commission on reparatory justice in his name. This is only fitting as it also offers an opportunity to complete the unfinished work of President Clinton’s Commission on Race”, states the letter.

Dr. Ron Daniels, convenor of the NAARC and President of the Institute of the Black World 21st Century (IBW), said that from Ferguson to Baltimore to Charleston, this most recent period has revealed that white supremacy is alive and well in the United States.

“As you have related, Mr. President, despite progress since the era of enslavement, Jim Crow and de fact discrimination/segregation the ‘badges and indicia’ of the long-standing exploitation and oppression of people of African descent are reflected in the devastating disparities in health, education, housing, employment, economic development, wealth and incarceration rates which harm large numbers of Black people each and every day in this land of enormous opportunity,” the letter states.

“Despite these realities, polls and studies indicate that a substantial number of white Americans fail to see or are in denial about the stubborn persistence of racism and its effects on Black people”, said NAARC Commissioner Dr. Iva Carruthers, general secretary of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference.

“This year marks the beginning of the United Nations Decade for People of African Descent. We believe there can be no more perfect union in the United States until there is a thoughtful, frank, thorough and uncompromising examination of white supremacy as a malignancy which must be cured,” added NAARC commissioner Dr. Patricia Newton, CEO of the Black Psychiatrists of America.

“The American nation cannot heal until it confronts and addresses the injustices of the past and those that are being perpetrated today on people of African descent as a consequence of systemic/structural bias that inflicts every are of life in this society,” said NAARC Commissioner Rev. JoAnn Watson, former member of the Detroit City Council. “There can be no real peace until there is justice, repair, restitution and healing for black people in this country.”

Meanwhile, several national Black professional organizations are supporting the NAARC’s call to President Obama and are encouraging the broader civil rights and human rights communities to join their voices in requesting that he establish the Dr. John Hope Franklin Commission for Reparatory Justice as a matter of national urgency.

Most people like to think that American K-12 schools, workplaces and courthouses are pillars of fairness, but statistic after statistic all point to a crisis among the young, Black men of the nation. This crisis begins in homes, stretches to K-12 educational experiences, and leads straight to the cycle of incarceration in increasingly high numbers. In America’s prison systems, black citizens are incarcerated at six times the rates of white ones – and the NAACP predicts that one in three of this generation of Black men will spend some time locked up.

Decreasing the rates of incarceration for black men may actually be a matter of improving educational outcomes for black boys in America. In his piece “A Broken Windows Approach to Education Reform,” Forbes writer James Marshall Crotty makes a direct connection between drop-out and crime rates. He argues that if educators will simply take a highly organized approach to keeping kids in school, it will make a difference in the crime statistics of the future.

While there are many areas of improvement that we could look at changing for more successful outcomes for black men, I will discuss just four indicators that illustrate the current situation for black boys in the U.S., with the hope of starting a conversation about what we can do to produce a stronger generation of Black young men in our society.

Black boys are more likely to be placed in special education.

While it is true that Black boys often arrive in Kindergarten classrooms with inherent disadvantages, they continue to experience a “behind the 8-ball” mentality as their school careers progress. Black boys are more likely than any other group to be placed in special education classes, with 80 percent of all special education students being Black or Hispanic males.

Learning disabilities are just a part of the whole picture. Black students (and particularly boys) experience disconnection when it comes to the authority figures in their classrooms. The K-12 teaching profession is dominated by white women, many of whom are very qualified and very interested in helping all their students succeed but lack the first-hand experience needed to connect with their Black male students.

Black boys are more likely to attend schools without the adequate resources to educate them.

Schools with majority Black students tend to have lower amounts of teachers who are certified in their degree areas. A U.S. Department of Education report found that in schools with at least 50 percent Black students, only 48 percent were certified in the subject, compared with 65 percent in majority white schools. In English, the numbers were 59 and 68 percent, respectively and in science, they were 57 percent and 73 percent.

Black boys are not reading at an adequate level.

In 2014, the Black Star Project published findings that just 10 percent of eighth-grade Black boys in the U.S. are considered “proficient” in reading. In urban areas like Chicago and Detroit, that number was even lower. By contrast, the 2013 National Assessment of Education Progress found that 46 percent of white students are adequate readers by eighth grade, and 17 percent of Black students as a whole are too. The achievement gap between the two races is startling, but the difference between the NAEP report on Black students as a whole and the Black Star findings of just Black boys is troubling too. It is not simply Black children in general who appear to be failing in the basics – like literacy; it is the boys.

Reading is only one piece of the school puzzle, of course, but it is a foundational one. If the eighth graders in our schools cannot read, how will they ever learn other subjects and make it to a college education (or, in reality, to a high school diploma)? Reading scores tell us so much more than the confines of their statistics. I believe these numbers are key to understanding the plight of young Black men in our society as a whole.

Punishment for black boys is harsher than for any other demographic.

Punishment for Black boys – even first-time offenders – in schools is harsher than any other demographic. Consider these facts:

What’s most troubling is that not all of the Black boys taken from their schools in handcuffs are violent, or even criminals. Increasingly, school-assigned law enforcement officers are leading these students from their schools hallways for minor offenses, including class disruption, tardiness and even non-violent arguments with other students. It seems that it is easier to remove these students from class through the stigma of suspension or arrest than to look for in-school solutions.

School suspension, and certainly arrest, is just the beginning of a life considered on the wrong side of the law for many Black boys. By 18 years of age, 30 percent of Black males have been arrested at least once, compared to just 22 percent of white males. Those numbers rise to 49 percent for Black men by the age of 23, and 38 percent of white males. Researchers from several universities concluded earlier this year that arrests early in life often set the course for more crimes and incarceration throughout the rest of the offender’s lifetime.

No wonder they aren’t in college…

These trends are not conducive to improving the numbers of young black men who are able to attend college. In fact, the numbers are dismal when it comes to black young men who attend and graduate from colleges in the U.S. Statistically speaking, black men have the lowest test scores, the worst grades and the highest dropout rates – in K-12 education, and in college too. The recognition of this educational crisis has led to some strong initiatives targeted at young black men with the intention of guiding them through the college years and to successful, productive lives that follow.

This is why college motivation within and outside the black community is so vital for these young men. At this point in the nation’s history, they are in the greatest need for the lifestyle change that higher education can provide, and not just for individual growth, but also for the benefit of the entire nation. But in order to get there, black boys must experience the motivation to succeed well before college.

‘In the survey, … Black fathers were most likely to bathe, dress, diaper, or help their children use the toilet on a daily basis. This was true for 70 percent of Black dads who lived with their children, compared with 60 percent of White dads and 45 percent of Latino dads.’

WASHINGTON (NNPA) – Contrary to the myth, though Black men are more likely to live apart from their children than Whites, they are more involved in the lives of their children than Whites and Hispanics.The Centers for Disease Control report, which covered a sample of 10,403 men aged 15–44 years from 2006-2010, and a separate survey debunked the myth.

It is true that Black dads are more likely to live apart from their children; the Pew Research Center reports that 44 percent do. However, Pew also found that 67 percent of Black fathers who don’t live with their children see them at least once a month, compared to 69 percent of White dads and 32 percent of Latino dads who don’t live with their children.

Among fathers who resided with their kids, African American dads were more involved in their children’s lives.In the survey, fathers rated how often they performed certain activities with any or all of their children over the previous four weeks. Black fathers were most likely to bathe, dress, diaper, or help their children use the toilet on a daily basis. This was true for 70 percent of Black dads who lived with their children, compared with 60 percent of White dads and 45 percent of Latino dads.

Although few fathers outside the home could say they did this every day (across race), but Black dads were the top hygiene helpers (12 percent, compared to 6 percent for Whites and 7 percent for Latinos).

According to a similar report from the Pew Research Center, 62 percent of all Black fathers read to their children at least several times per week. Black dads in the CDC survey who didn’t live with their children were more than twice as likely as their White counterparts to host story time every day.

These same “absent” Black dads were significantly the most likely to talk to their school-age children about their day—more than 50 percent reported having done so several times per week or more, compared to 34 percent of absent White dads and 23 percent of absent Latino fathers.

But critics from President Obama on the left to Fox News on the right have been unstinting in their criticism of Black males absent from the home. However, their criticism invariably overlooks the extent of their involvement revealed by the CDC report.

President Obama recently defended what some consider talking down to Black audiences.

At a panel discussion on poverty at Georgetown University, Mr. Obama said: “It’s true that if I’m giving a commencement at Morehouse [College] that I will have a conversation with young Black men about taking responsibility as fathers that I probably will not have with the women of Barnard. And I make no apologies for that. And the reason is because I am a Black man who grew up without a father and I know the cost that I paid for that.”

According to CDC, Black patriarchs are the likeliest of all men to be stay-at-home dads (13 percent of Black dads who live with their children are), while 29 percent of Black fathers are single heads of their households.

Black marriage (or a lack thereof) is closely related to the absent Black father story, and it too brings its own misconceptions. It is true that Black families are least likely of all races to be led by a married couple; Pew data asserts that 72 percent of Black fathers have a child or children out of wedlock, and only 36 percent are married to the mother of their children. Cohabitation, co-parenting, single parenting, and blended or extended families have always been more common in the Black community than among other races.

But in the CDC study, cohabiting and single fathers of all races either outperformed or held their own in raising their children when compared to married fathers. The data suggests that cohabitation or co-parenting isn’t necessarily a weaker family structure, nor does it necessarily result in poor paternal involvement.

“While more than one-quarter (27 percent) of fathers are living apart from their children 18 or younger, there is a huge variation in the type of involvement that these—non-co-resident fathers have with their children,” a 2011 Pew report found.

“On one end of the spectrum, almost one-fifth (18 percent) report only occasional contacts with their children, and no visits in over a year. At the other end of the spectrum are the 14 percent of fathers who live apart from their children but report still seeing them several times a week, and talking with or emailing them several times a week, as well.”

The percentage of kids living apart from their fathers has more than doubled in the past 50 years, according to Pew, but absent no longer means uninvolved. And in some cases, absent Black fathers are the most involved of all.

Even Mr. Obama has sounded a note of optimism, saying at Georgetown: “And I also know that I have the capacity to break that cycle, and as a consequence, I think my daughters are better off. And that is not something that—for me to have that conversation does not negate my conversation about the need for early childhood education, or the need for job training, or the need for greater investment in infrastructure, or jobs in low-income communities.”

]]>http://blackstarjournal.org/?feed=rss2&p=48090For the Poor, the Graduation Gap Is Even Wider Than the Enrollment Gaphttp://blackstarjournal.org/?p=4793
http://blackstarjournal.org/?p=4793#commentsFri, 19 Jun 2015 05:11:43 +0000http://blackstarjournal.org/?p=4793

Susan Dynarski

June 2, 2015

Rich and poor students don’t merely enroll in college at different rates; they also complete it at different rates. The graduation gap is even wider than the enrollment gap.
In 2002, researchers with the National Center for Education Statistics started tracking a cohort of 15,000 high school sophomores. The project, called the Education Longitudinal Study, recorded information about the students’ academic achievement, college entry, work history and college graduation. A recent publication examines the completed education of these young people, who are now in their late 20s.
The study divided students into four equally sized groups, or quartiles, depending on their parents’ education, income and occupation. The students in the lowest quartile had parents with the lowest income and education, more likely to work in unskilled jobs. Those in the highest quartile had parents with the highest income and education, those more likely to be professionals or managers.

In both groups, most of the teenagers had high hopes for college. Over all, more than 70 percent of sophomores planned to earn a bachelor’s degree. In the top quartile, 87 percent expected to get at least a bachelor’s, with 24 percent aiming for an advanced degree.

In the bottom quartile, 58 percent of students expected to get at least a bachelor’s degree and 12 percent to go on to graduate school.

Thirteen years later, we can see who achieved their goals.

Among the participants from the most disadvantaged families, just 14 percent had earned a bachelor’s degree.

That is, one out of four of the disadvantaged students who had hoped to get a bachelor’s had done so. Among those from the most advantaged families, 60 percent had earned a bachelor’s, about two-thirds of those who had planned to.

Seeing these numbers, some readers may wonder whether the poor children were simply overconfident, with aspirations outstripping their academic skills. Maybe the low-income children weren’t completing college because they were not able.

The survey lets us check this hypothesis. As part of the study, high school students completed a battery of tests in math and reading. And the results show that the hypothesis is wrong: educational achievement does not explain the gap in bachelor’s degree attainment.

Consider the teenagers who scored among the top 25 percent of students on the math test. In this group, the students from the top socioeconomic quartile had very high bachelor’s degree completion rates: 74 percent of the most advantaged students with top math scores earned a four-year college degree by the time they were in their late 20s.

But only 41 percent of the poorest students with the top math scores did so. That’s a completion gap of 33 percentage points, not much smaller than the overall gap of 46 percentage points.

Academic skills in high school, at least as measured by a standardized math test, explain only a small part of the socioeconomic gap in educational attainment.

Here’s another startling comparison: A poor teenager with top scores and a rich teenager with mediocre scores are equally likely to graduate with a bachelor’s degree. In both groups, 41 percent receive a degree by their late 20s.

And even among the affluent students with the lowest scores, 21 percent managed to receive a bachelor’s degree, compared with just 5 percent of the poorest students. Put bluntly, class trumps ability when it comes to college graduation.

Poor students are increasingly falling behind well-off children in their test scores, as recent research by Sean Reardon at Stanford University shows.

That is, any poor children who manage to score at the top of the class are increasingly beating the odds. Yet even when they beat the odds in high school, they still must fight a new set of tough odds when it comes to completing college.

Susan M. Dynarski is a professor of education, public policy and economics at the University of Michigan. Follow her on Twitter at @dynarski.

]]>http://blackstarjournal.org/?feed=rss2&p=47930Nonacademic Skills Are Key To Success. But What Should We Call Them?http://blackstarjournal.org/?p=4788
http://blackstarjournal.org/?p=4788#commentsFri, 19 Jun 2015 04:56:21 +0000http://blackstarjournal.org/?p=4788

­

Anya Kamenetz

May 28, 2015

More and more people in education agree on the importance of learning stuff other than academics.

But no one agrees on what to call that “stuff”.

There are least seven major overlapping terms in play. New ones are being coined all the time. This bagginess bugs me, as a member of the education media. It bugs researchers and policymakers too.

“Basically we’re trying to explain student success educationally or in the labor market with skills not directly measured by standardized tests,” says Martin West, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “The problem is, you go to meetings and everyone spends the first two hours complaining and arguing about semantics.”

West studies what he calls “non-cognitive skills.” Although he’s not completely happy with that term.

The problem isn’t just semantic, argues Laura Bornfreund, deputy director of the education policy program at the New America Foundation. She wrote a paper on what she called “Skills for Success,” since she didn’t like any of these other terms. “There’s a lot of different terms floating around but also a lack of agreement on what really is most important to students.”

As Noah Webster, the great American lexicographer and educator, put it back in 1788, “The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities; and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head.”

Yet he didn’t come up with a good name, either.

So, in Webster’s tradition, here’s a short glossary of terms that are being used for that cultivation of the heart. Vote for your favorite in the comments — or propose a new one.

According to the Partnership for 21st Century Learning, a research and advocacy group, these include the “4Cs of critical thinking, collaboration, communication and creativity,” as well as “life and career skills” and “information, media and technology skills.”

The problem, says West, is that “if anything, all the evidence would suggest that in the closing decades of the 20th and 21st centuries, cognitive skills became more important than ever.” So this term, although it’s often heard in business and technology circles, doesn’t necessarily signal the shift in focus that some researchers want.

Character education has a long history in the U.S., with a major vogue in the 1930s and a revival in the 1980s and 1990s. Beginning a few years ago, the KIPP charter schools in New York City started to emphasize a curriculum of seven “character strengths”: grit, zest, optimism, self-control, gratitude, social intelligence and curiosity.

“We’re not religious, we’re not talking about ethics, we’re not going to give any kind of doctrine about what is right from wrong,” says Leyla Bravo-Willey of KIPP Infinity in Harlem. “But there are some fundamental things that make people really great citizens, which usually include being kind.”

West argues that the use of “character” is inappropriate in research and policymaking because of its moral and religious connotations.

He notes that many of the qualities on the KIPP list — grit and self-control, for example — are designed to prepare students for success. “That’s in tension with a traditional understanding of character, which often implies something being good in and of itself — which often includes some notion of self sacrifice,” says West.

That distinction doesn’t bother Bravo-Willey. She says that the school is responding to parents’ own wishes that their children be happy and good as well as successful.

Grit is a pioneer virtue with a long American history — think of the classic western True Grit. When Angela Duckworth was working on her dissertation in the mid-2000s, she chose the term to encapsulate the measures of self-control, persistence and conscientiousness that she was finding to be powerful determinants of success. It quickly caught on — maybe too quickly, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist says.

“I’m grateful for the attention, but that gratitude and amazement was quickly replaced by anxiety about people thinking that we had figured things out already.” She’s worried that grit is being overemphasized: In a recent paper, she argued that grit measures aren’t ready to be incorporated into high stakes accountability systems. “I’m also concerned that people interpret my position to be that grit’s the only thing that matters.”

Larry Nucci at UC Berkeley, who has studied moral development and character education for 40 years, has stronger words for grit. “I think it’s flavor of the month. It’s not very substantive, it’s not very deep.”

Carol Dweck, the Stanford University psychologist, chose the term mindset in 2007 for the title of her bestselling book.

“Growth mindset” is the belief that positive traits, including intelligence, can be developed with practice. “Fixed mindset” refers to the idea that intelligence and other talents are set at birth.

“In my research papers I had some very, very clunky scientific-sounding term for the fixed and the growth mindset,” she says. “When I went to write the book I thought, these will not do at all.”

Mindset has caught on tremendously in both the business and education worlds. But Dweck’s concern is that it’s being used willy-nilly to justify any old intuition that people might have about positive thinking in the classroom.

“When people start thinking, ‘I’ll make the kids feel good and they’ll learn,’ that’s how something like the self-esteem movement gains traction,” — a 1980s trend that led to lots of trophies but little improvement in achievement.

This term is most strongly associated with the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman. He analyzed large data sets to show that attributes such as self-discipline and persistence — not just academic achievement — affected education, labor market and life outcomes.

This term is “ugly, broad, nonspecific,” argues Carol Dweck — and she’s a fan. “I’m the only person who likes the term,” she says. “And I’ll tell you why: It is a very diverse group of factors and the reason it’s been hard to come up with a name is that they don’t necessarily belong together.”

Martin West at Harvard uses this term himself, but he says he’s always careful to acknowledge that it can be “misleading.”

“Every skill or trait is cognitive in the sense that it involves and reflects the processing of information of some kind in our brains,” he says. And West adds that traditional academic skills more often than not are complements, not substitutes, for the attitudes and personality traits captured by the term “non-cognitive skills.”

Nobody I spoke with hates this term.

“Increasingly teachers who are on the front line say that it’s very important to teach kids to be more socially and emotionally competent,” says Roger P. Weissberg, chief knowledge officer of the Collaborative for Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL), which promotes the concept and the term nationwide. “Teachers feel, and growing research supports, that it helps them academically, it improves school climate, it improves discipline, and it’s going to help them to be college and career — and life — ready.”

The only problem is that the “skills” part may not be seen as encompassing things that are more like attitudes or beliefs, like growth mindset. And the “social and emotional” part, again, may be seen as excluding skills that are really cognitive in nature.

This is tough, right?

Employers commonly use “soft skills” to include anything from being able to write a letter, to showing up on time and having a firm handshake. Most of the researchers I spoke with felt this phrase downplays the importance of these skills. “Soft skills, along with 21st century skills, strike me as exceptionally vague,” says West. “I don’t know that there’s anything soft about them.”

So the struggle persists. Maybe one day there will be a pithy acronym or portmanteau to wrap all these skills up with a bow. SES? SEL? N-COG? Gri-Grow-Sess? Let us know what you think.

Parents who mentor their kids by teaching them good daily success habits, set their kids up to achieve far more than 95% of their peers and go on to achieve great success in life. In my study of the daily habits of the rich and the poor (Rich Habits Study – Background on Methodology http://richhabits.net/rich-habits-study-background-on-methodology/) I uncovered certain money habit strategies that the wealthy learned from their parents as children:

Chore Income – Don’t give an allowance. That implies entitlement. Give them money in exchange for doing their chores and explain to them that this is income they earned. Make a list of all of the chores that can be done. The more chores they do, the more income they make. Pay them a bonus when they do chores not on the list. You can expand this Chore Income strategy by paying your kids for certain good behavior, such as reading 30 minutes or more each day, volunteering, limiting TV and Internet use to less than 1 hour a day, getting their homework done by a certain time each day, getting A’s in school, exercising, good etiquette, achieving goals, not eating junk food etc.

Work For Their Stuff – Parents of kids who grew up to become wealthy and successful, made their kids work for what they wanted. In today’s world, that includes computers, ipads, iphones, designer clothes, computer games etc. Having to work for what you want creates a work ethic and helps your kids understand the value of money. A good age to teach this Rich Habit is age 14 and up; the age when kids can work.

The Savings Rule – The majority of the wealthy in my study had a habit of saving. Help your kids form good savings habits by taking 50% of money gifts from your child after they receive the gift. Then put this 50% in a savings account for your kids. What the kids do with their 50% is up to them. This teaches them responsible spending because when the money’s gone their on their own.

50:50 Budgeting Rule – This rule teaches kids to save for their stuff when they are too young to have a job. When kids reach age 10 parents should start teaching their kids to budget and save for things like iphones, video games, trendy clothes etc. One way to do this is for parents to agree to match whatever their kids save from their Chore Income or their share of their Gifts Savings.

Evils of Credit Cards – Kids need to learn that credit cards are bad and should only be used for emergencies. The wealthy were taught by their parents that if you have to use credit cards for your ordinary living expenses you’re living beyond your means and you will wind up poor. Age 14 and up is a good age to start indoctrinating kids about the evils of credit cards. Once a month reminders should do the trick.